Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Trader Joe's Speculoos Cookie Butter Ice Cream

[New for 2014] For those who don't know, my family is made up of cookie spread fans. We always have Biscoff cookies and Biscoff spread (with backups) in the cabinet. It has taken the place of peanut butter in our house and not more than a few days goes by before someone is enjoying a Biscoff filled sandwich (I always have mine with marshmallow fluff). I used it to spice up some boring cookie dough ice cream way back in 2011. I've even tried it on celery. It's just great stuff [Note: we don't do the Trader Joe's cookie butter because it's cross contaminated with nuts unfortunately].

Trader Joe's Speculoos Cookie Butter Ice Cream

This is cool, check out how the ice cream visual progress as we dig down.

Opening shot: so many cookie crumbs!

Half inch down: cookie bits everywhere!

further down: holy cow! it's hunks of cookie butter swirl!

I take a few bites and have a thought, but I take a few more bites to verify. Yeah, the vanilla is very strong, and the cookie butter flavoring is secondary. Oh, it's there, but you get that creamy vanilla blast with notes of specaloos (biscoff cookies) rather than a full on cookie butter assault.

This swirl is neat, whether or not it was suppose to clump up like that. I can't wait to find more in my second (and third and fourth) scooping. However, I iwsh they had applied some cookie butter right to the base itself to jack up the flavor profile.

Rather than the cookie bits coming together with the ice cream to form a gritty texture, we are instead treated to a very smooth/creamy (melty) texture with soft speed bumps of cookie bits. There's no definitive crunch if that's what you were hoping for.

Having inhaled my first double serving, I am left full but wanting a bit. I think the problem is that I have such a high tolerance for cookie spread (if you eat it regularly than you'll know what I mean), that this somewhat mild version seems incomplete to me. It's not bad, and I'm sure it will sell well, but I think it needs a spark of something to complete the flavor profile.

On Second Scoop: As always, please don't take my initial impressions to mean this is a bad ice cream, it's not, it's good, just not epic like I had hoped for. I'm still enjoying it, I just want it to have a little more pizzazz. Several people have already commented on how to make it better (I just tried it with some crushed oatmeal cookies as suggested on our facebook page), so don't be afraid to explore with this one.

8 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I agree. There wasn't a strong enough cookie butter taste for me. So I melted some extra cookie butter in the microwave, then added it on top and mixed it in...it was perfect. I would even say magical.

Got this the other day. I really like it! I agree though... that I wish the cookie butter taste was stronger, but I made my own "fix" and proceeded to buy some speculoos cookies from Tjs, crumbled them on top of the ice cream, and BAM! Totally delicious :)

@Dubba That's what they use in the store-bought stuff, and I've never heard of anything else being used. Apparently the hardening at cold temps effect is due to the saturated fat content. Coconut oil is over 80% saturated fat, so yeah, it's horrible for you. I doubt anything with significantly less saturated fat would work.

Coconut oil isn't horrible for you. It was vilified by people who wanted to sell us other oils here in the US, not for health reasons. It's an excellent food and downright therapeutic for many conditions.

@Josh & @jwoolman: ha! we were just having this discussion on another spot (oure facebook page maybe). My son actually likes coconut milk yogurt, which has lots of sat fat, but a few people like Nick have told me not to worry about it.